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Being Norwegian in a Shrinking World

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Being Norwegian in a Shrinking World BEING NORWEGIAN IN A SHRINKING WORLD REFLECTIONS ON NORWEGIAN IDENTITY THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN In Anne Cohen Kiel, ed., Continuity and Change: Aspects of Modern Norway, Scandinavian University Press 1993. Could these gents be Norwegian traditionalists showing off recent haute couture from the national heritage industry? Read the essay and find out! A desolate rocky cliff arising gloomily from the foaming, dark Arctic waters - the home of a small breed of stocky peasants and tough fishermen painfully eking out a living from their rough and hostile environment. Is this Norway? No? Then how about this one: It is the most perfect democracy in the world; along with Sweden it has the planet's only fully-fledged welfare state, it is technologically highly advanced and rich in natural resources, and its inhabitants enjoy the highest standard of living in the world as well as the least polluted environment. The German sociologist Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote, in his small book on Norway (Enzensberger, 1984), that this country is simultaneously an ethnological museum and a future laboratory. Seen from the vantage-point of continental Europe, Norway is in many respects out of step, and Enzensberger's characterisation of the country as a place of contradictions - wedged between the turbulence of modernity and the inertia of tradition - may be a good starting-point for a reflection over Norwegian identity at the end of the second millennium, A.D. 1 The first part of this chapter outlines the contemporary domestic discourse about "Norwegianness". In the second part of the chapter, critical light is shed on the cultural construction of modern Norway, and some recent challenges to the customary perceptions of Norwegian identity will also be discussed. 1. THE ONGOING INVENTION OF NORWEGIAN IDENTITY The making of the Norwegian nation Foreigners are often at a loss at describing the country in simple terms, but so are - alas - Norwegians. Since the advent of Norwegian nationalism in the 19th century, discussions concerning the Norwegian national character have periodically been at the frontstage of public life in the country, and they never fail to arouse great passion. What does it actually entail to be Norwegian? What are the Norwegians "really" like, and in which ways are they different from other peoples? In the early 1990s, these issues have flared up with almost unprecedented intensity. There are several causes for this strong interest in Norwegian national identity, and we shall look into some of them in greater detail below. Let me nevertheless mention the recent wave of non- European immigrants, the Saami ethnic movement in the north, the prospect of membership in the European Community, the globalisation of culture, and the planning of the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, as some concomitant processes which inspire many Norwegians to scratch their heads and ask themselves: Who are we, and why is that so? When we try to understand the contemporary concern with Norwegian national identity, we should keep in mind that the country's history has been construed so as to distinguish it crucially from every other European country, including its closest neighbours, Sweden and Denmark. Although there was a mediaeval kingdom roughly where Norway is presently located, its history as an independent nation-state is short, dating from its peaceful secession from Sweden in 1905. Sweden, being among the winners of the Napoleonic wars in 1814, had in turn taken over Norway from one of the losers, Denmark. Norway 2 had then been a part of the Danish kingdom for more than four hundred years. A peripheral country in Europe as well as in the world-system until the 20th century, Norway was scarcely affected by the many upheavals and conflicts unfolding on the Continent from the Renaissance on, and its development followed, in many respects, its own course. Notably, Norway was never an independent colonial power, nor did it have a widespread feudal system. For centuries, the only sizeable town with strong links to Continental Europe was Bergen in the west. With no powerful city bourgeoisie and no strong landed gentry, burgeoning Norwegian nationalism took on a different character from that of other European countries in the 19th century. It was emphatically rural and egalitarian in its orientation, and it tended to glorify the simple ways of life of the countryside rather than revelling in urban grandeur or the military pride of the state (see Berggreen's contribution to this book). There was, after all, little grandeur and military pride to attach oneself to, since the country had been a peripheral part of the Danish kingdom for centuries. An irony of this invention of nationhood is the fact that those individuals who most strongly promoted the idea of Norwegianness as a rural form of life, were themselves urban and highly educated people - their daily life was very far removed from that of the simple peasants whom they defined as the carriers of national identity. It was the urban middle-class, riding on a pan- European wave of 19th century romanticism, which decided on rural folk costumes, folk dances and fairy-tales as central national symbols towards the end of the nineteenth century.i The farmers who actually wore the "typical" costumes and danced the "typical" dances were less likely to see them as "typically Norwegian" (Østerud, 1984). This creative production of a national identity consists in what an anthropologist might describe as a form of bricolage (following Lévi-Strauss, 1962), whereby one appropriates a set of known objects or symbols, and combines them in new ways in order to create new forms of meaning. Thus the old dances, tales and handicrafts of the Norwegian countryside took on a new meaning when they were juxtaposed with the trappings of a modern state and a nationalist ideology. 3 Nationalism Nationalism is a kind of ideology which proclaims that the political boundaries should be coterminous with the cultural boundaries of a given territory; in other words, that a state (a "country") should only contain people of the same kind (Gellner, 1983). The idea of the Norwegian nation was born the moment a few people decided that (i) the area contained a distinct culture, (ii) the area should have political self-determination. Neither of these assumptions were evidently or "naturally" true at the time. During the formative stage of Norwegian nationalism in the mid-19th century, Norwegian nationalists had to compete with Scandinavianists, who regarded Scandinavia (or at least Norway and Denmark) as a single cultural area.ii That fusion of a cultural identity with a state which is implied in nationalism, is not in itself "natural" either, as recent writers on the history of nationalism have reminded us (Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983). Before (and indeed after) the French Revolution in 1789, few states were nation-states: they were multi-cultural states. At the court of the Ottoman empire, to mention but one example, three languages were spoken - Arabic, Turkish and Farsi (Persian). At the royal court in Copenhagen - the capital of Denmark-Norway - German, French and Danish were used. Nationalism and nationhood are cultural products, imaginatively created by nationalists. Nationhood is a social fact in so far as the inhabitants of an area believe in the existence of that imagined community (Anderson's, 1983, phrase) which is proposed by the nationalists. They hold that they have something profound in common, which could be phrased as metaphoric kinship, with a great number of people whom they will never know personally. It is in this sense that the nation may be spoken of as an imagined community; it is no more "imaginary" than other kinds of communities, but it is abstract and depends on ideological justification - it must be "imagined" by its members - in order to exist. In the case of Norway, Norwegianism was eventually to win out over Scandinavianism, and by today, surely, few Norwegians claim that they belong to the same nation as Danes, or Swedes, for that matter. 4 Nationhood need not be strongly related to "objective cultural traits", although nationalist ideology tries to persuade people that it is. So although it could be argued that people from south-eastern Norway have more in common culturally with people from centralwestern Sweden than with people from western Norway, such a similarity has little consequence in so far as people from Eastern and Western Norway insist that they belong to the same nation and exclude Swedes from it. The nation is, in other words, a historical and cultural fact; it is not a fact of nature. Nationalism is also a modern phenomenon, and this has been poorly understood until quite recently. Since nationalists are eager to present their nation as ancient, and since they draw on traditionalist symbolism (such as folk costumes and myths of ancient wars), many have been led to believe that nations - such as the Norwegian one - are indeed very old. In fact, the use of old symbols (some dating back to the Viking era) in Norwegian nationalism can be quite confusing since it seems to suggest that the Norwegian nation can be traced back to the Viking era. We should therefore be aware that these symbols had a different meaning in their original context, before that creative bricolage which built a bridge between past and present. At that time, the springar (a typical dance) was not an expression of national identity, but an imported weekend pastime, or a part of a wedding ritual. It is only retrospectively that it has become an embodiment of nationality. Looking critically at the historical sources of the nationalist project, one will find that they are ambiguous. For example, the history of the Nordic region may just as well be used to justify a Scandinavian or regional identity as a Norwegian one; the history of each country is intertwined with that of the other Scandinavian countries, and at a lower level, people from Sunnmøre may feel that they have little in common with people from Oslo.
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